Painting Our Lady of Light: Winter Holidays 2016 by Angela Yarber

There’s nothing like the holiday season to bring out everyone’s least feminist self. In one of the courses that I teach—Gender, Food, and the Body in Popular Culture—students are assigned to examine gender roles throughout the holiday season through the lens intersectional ecofeminism. Inevitably, almost every student returns from holiday break with the same assessment: mom, grandma, and a kitchen full of women prepare, cook, and clean every family meal; women do the holiday shopping; men in the family watch sports.

Of course, this isn’t true of everyone. There are plenty of families which subvert and dismantle stereotypical gender roles, but the holidays seem to heighten these roles, undergirding them with some kind of nostalgic and theological weight that claims that if mama doesn’t arduously prepare her famed casserole, the season will be ruined. Otherwise committed feminists find themselves singing carols filled with sexist language and participating in holiday rituals that they would critique any other time of the year. Subversion be damned because we want our traditional family holiday!

I’ve long struggled with creative ways to subversively approach the holidays as a queer clergywoman, parent, artist, and worship consultant. People like their nostalgic and heart-warming traditions, even when they sometimes smack of patriarchy, racism, and heteronormativity. I’ve confronted this as a preacher and worship planner, often to raised eyebrows or angry phone calls from congregants who just want to sing the carols without the preacher changing the words, or dismissing the notion of a virgin birth, or hanging enormous paintings of pregnant women all over the sanctuary.

But maintaining our intersectional feminism is important, even in the face of holiday nostalgia. Since I began the Holy Women Icons Project, I’ve wanted to paint a Holy Woman Icon who could somehow embody a feminist approach to the myriad winter holidays, yet kept elements of that warm nostalgia that is so important in the season. So, this year I painted Our Lady of Light in an attempt to honor a host of different spiritual traditions that focus on light this winter season.

In my own tradition, we are not yet celebrating Christmas (despite the capitalist consumer onslaught that has been on full throttle since October). Rather, we are about to dwell in the deep blue darkness of Advent, when we wait, long, and prepare for light to be birthed into our world. A candle is lit each Sunday during Advent and the light grows brighter in anticipation of the birth of Christ.

Advent is not the lone holiday that celebrates flickering light growing in the darkness this month. In addition to Advent, many of our Jewish friends will celebrate Hanukkah, a Festival of Lights. Each night a candle is lit as we remember, “such is the way of creation: first comes darkness, then light.” This season also hosts the Wiccan holiday of Yule, which marks the New Year and the celebration of the birth of the God as the Winter-born king, symbolized by the rebirth of the life-generating and life-sustaining sun. Yule is a time for ritually shedding the impurities of the past year and for meditating on ways in which you can develop your spirit in the year to come. In addition to Yule, December 21 is also Tohji-taisai, the Shinto Grand Ceremony of the Winter Solstice. Tohji-taisai celebrates the joy of the sun ending its yin period as it declines in strength, and the beginning of the yang period as its power grows stronger and stronger as the days lengthen. The sun is of central importance in Japan, expressing the presence of Amaterasu Omikami, or the Kami of the Sun.

As the days begin to grow longer again, Advent will end and the Christmas season will begin. Like the brightening of days, the liturgical colors shift from deep blue or purple to bright white or gold. Light is birthed. The sun grows stronger. Emmanuel is with us. As the twelve days of Christmas begin, so too, does Kwanza, a West African holy season where the candles of a seven-branched candelabrum are lit to represent seven holy attributes: unity, self-determination, responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith.

Each of these meaningful wisdom traditions holds unique value that should not be overlooked. The last thing I want to do is neglect their uniqueness by combining them all into one woman. Whether the lights are coming from the Advent candles, the Menorah, the yang period of the sun, the fire dancers celebrating the Winter-born king, the seven-branched candelabrum, or the Christmas tree, they are providing illumination in the midst of shadows, pointing us toward peace.

Such is the work of Our Lady of Light, honoring and respecting the rich diversity and beauty of the myriad holy seasons we celebrate this time of year. Surrounded by the holiday nostalgia we still hold so dear, yet with arms outstretched to embrace more and more, her heart cries out to us:

As you consider the message you’d like to send in your holiday cards this season, remember Our Lady of Light. Embody her message by proclaiming peace in the midst of war, hope in the face of despair, love to those who seem unlovable, and joy when your heart is hurting.

17 replies

Here is another Lady of Light:
Saint Lucy’s Day, also called the Feast of Saint Lucy, is a Christian feast day celebrated on 13 December in Advent, commemorating Saint Lucy, a 3rd-century martyr under the Diocletianic Persecution,[1] who according to legend brought “food and aid to Christians hiding in the catacombs” using a candle-lit wreath to “light her way and leave her hands free to carry as much food as possible”.[2][3] Her feast once coincided with the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year before calendar reforms, so her feast day has become a festival of light.[4][5] Falling within the Advent season, Saint Lucy’s Day is viewed as an event signaling the arrival of Christmastide, pointing to the arrival of the Light of Christ in the kalendar, on Christmas Day.[1][6]

Given the current political climate, I don’t have the energy for the football conversation now, either. Though I have quite a few college football students in my class and we’re doing our best to create feminist football players!

Oh, please, let us NOT discuss football. Back in the suburb of St. Louis where I grew up, the women did all the hard work, including washing and drying a huge pile of dishes (dishwashers hadn’t been invented yet) while the men sat in the living room playing cards. Sometimes the kids were carted off to the movies after the big meal. My family was Calvinist and Republican, but Christmas was almost wholly secular for us. The only “religious” activity I remember is that I played Christmas carols on the piano and my brother sang them, and then we opened our presents.

Thanks so much for this, Angela. I love Advent and find it such a rich liturgical season – a time to be in the darkness, light candles, waiting, expecting. And thank you for including all the other celebrations of returning light.
So much has been lost in the commercialization of such holidays. We are encouraged to celebrate superficially, and for the profit of companies, while remembering the “Jesus is the reason for the season” superficial slogans that divide rather than bring people together in peace and joy.

Absolutely. It pains me that we are coerced by quiet compulsory cultural signs to perpetuate corporations selling items that will only serve to harm life, taking more from the earth and producing more waste. I try to buy gifts that can be used and are necessary for others such as soap or a knitted hat, being aware that my sources of these items are more ethical choices than I otherwise might make. My family knows I am trying to be minimalist now, and they have been lovely about it. As much as I can, I boycott consumerist “Christmas.”

Thank you so much for directing my mind toward a positive rendition of the holiday season. Like many others, I’ve been in the shock and depression of the chimera that is the majority’s choice, and so I feel this is a welcome offering, a respite. I long to have more ritual in my life, especially ones that integrate with nature, for some of us, the sacrifice of the trees as they shed their leaves and the brisk chill in the air, a wintery woman soon to approach. I feel we will all be Ladies of Light. Perhaps I will just light this candle on my table in front of me, or notice the bright red light behind my eyelids when I am out in the sun, and I will try to find the goddess outside and within me. Thank you dear. Your art and words are lovely.

Reblogged this on Searching For Eve and commented:
Could there be anything more perfect at this moment than gorgeous holiday cards featuring a subversive Iconic Mary spreading peace, hope, love and joy? This is the first time I’ve been introduced to the work of Dr. Angela Yarber, and I am beyond excited. Find her and her words and art at http://www.angelayarber.com The links to purchase the cards are in the article.